Feedback to students can be provided in a range of different ways through the Inspera platform. This article provides an overview and introduces the language used in Inspera. The different means of providing feedback will be dependent upon the design of the assessment and the selected workflow options plus whether automatically or manually marked questions are used.
This article will be of use to those new to using Inspera and should be read prior to creating questions and scheduling assessments.
Overview of Feedback options
Feedback can be provided in a variety of ways:
- Providing predefined feedback in automatically marked questions for each alternative.
- Providing predefined feedback for each question.
- This can be for the question as a whole (automatically marked questions) or defined by marking bands (manually marked questions).
- By use of rubrics
- Adding annotations and page notes (manually marked questions)
- By providing written general feedback on the submission. This is called ‘Explanations’ in Inspera.
- Generic feedback to all students (Assessment Feedback)
- Candidate report, an individual report that pulls together all feedback provided on an assessment.
Further information on using these options, with links to Inspera support pages, are provided below.
Scheduling the feedback options
Consideration as to use of some of these feedback options needs to be made when either developing your Questions and Question Sets and/or when setting the ‘After Test’ options when scheduling the assessment. For example, for predefined feedback, this needs to be added when creating questions, however whether this is displayed will be set when scheduling an assessment.
Setting up feedback options
Automatically Marked Questions
- Predefined feedback per Alternative and per Question
- Pre-defined feedback can be set at the question or alternative level. This will be added when authoring questions. Please note it is when the ‘After test’ settings are made that if and how this is displayed to students will be established. The feedback is visible is ‘Post-submission review’ is enabled and can be made available to students immediately after submission or at a defined time.
Manually Marked Questions
- Bands and criteria
- Use of Bands and Criteria allows for pre-defined feedback to be provided, by band, against specified criteria. Marks can be selected from the range applied to the different bands. These can be determined by marks or percentages. The Bands and Criteria need to be set up for individual questions.
- Bands and Criteria support article
- Rubrics
- Five rubrics are available through Inspera. These include:
- Points-based rubric
- Points-range rubric
- Percentage-range rubric
- Qualitative rubric
- Marked qualitative rubric
- Five rubrics are available through Inspera. These include:
- Annotations and page notes when grading
- Annotations and Page Notes can be used to provide feedback comments to students but also to post comments to fellow markers.
- Feedback comments can be added to students work when grading manually marked questions in the following ways:
- Annotations – highlighting text within student scripts and selecting Annotate to attach comments
- Page notes – allow for general comments to be attached to a question and are not linked to specific text in the script
- Highlighting – this function adds notes that are private to the grader
- Annotations made at the Question level can be made available to a wider audience, this might be all students, all graders or both.
General
- Explanations
- This is the term used for a space where general feedback can be provided to a student. It is available for all assessments.
- This setting needs to be enabled when scheduling an assessment, through the Planner. When enabling it is possible to allow students to request Explanations or for Graders to send Explanations directly.
- Candidate reports
- These reports are generated once grading is completed and pull together all the feedback on the students work, including marks, annotations, comments, explanations and any general feedback provided to the cohort (assessment feedback).
- Students can access this by logging into the Inspera Student Portal and viewing previous assessments.
- This needs to be enabled under General Settings when scheduling an Assessment
- Assessment Feedback
- Provides for sharing of common feedback to all students taking the test. This can be provided via text entered into Inspera, audio file or uploading an attachment.
